Rize Develops Digitally Augmented 3D Printed Parts

TCT Magazine was on hand last month at the Additive Manufacturing Users Group Conference in St. Louis, Missouri when Rize announced a brand-new capability for its Rize One machine.

This new ability, the additive manufacture of ‘Digitally Augmented Parts,” will allow engineers to “3D print parts featuring digital information.”

“Rize’s Augmented Polymer Deposition (APD) technology launched back in 2016 with unique extrusion and voxel-level ink jetting capabilities which enable parts to be printed with blue ink markings. Now that process can be utilized to 3D print secure information on an industrial part, such as a QR code for example, which can be scanned with a smartphone and instantly display the corresponding digital information.”

The significance of this is the reality we now find ourselves in where “users can now create a digital thread between the digital and physical part and accelerate Industry 4.0 technologies like blockchain and AR/VR applications.” Rize claims this will counteract challenges such as non-compliant parts, piracy, counterfeit, and obsolescence.

Rize’s President and CEO Andy Kalambi explains how Digitally Augmented 3D Printed Parts change “the user experience by ensuring the digital thread can go from a file to a physical part so the entire process is inclusive to the user experience.”

Kalambi goes on: “the moment the part gets printed on the machine it’s a physical part and there is no digital element left in it. The break of the digital link is a big issue for this industry overall to realize the promise of what is called Industry 4.0. So we took our marking capability that we had natively in our machine and what we did was we started working on a digitally augmented part, so we said let’s 3D print in at a voxel level a marker which enables you to connect this physical part to the digital world and keep it constantly connected.”